MangaDex@Home Update, New Affiliates, Looking for a Symfony dev, and a User Research Survey

[katelyngadd]

People volunteer their servers to cache chapters for MangaDex. You request a chapter from their server. If they don't have the chapter, then you get the chapter from us. The chapter is then saved to their server for the future. When someone else accesses the same chapter, the volunteer server will already have the chapter and serve the user it immediately without our own server needing to give it to them.

@plykiya So far I'm not seeing the described fallback behavior work - a few different chapters of a manga were failing to load, and when I disabled MdatHome they all started loading again. Is this what happens when people shut off their clients? I'd like to leave MdatHome enabled to reduce server load but the result is that big chunks of some chapters are missing. I would've expected those pages to just take a very long time to load as it gave up on using the network.

 

[blackyawgdom]

Once the cache gets larger and more people are made redundancies/other nodes the rate of "failures" will drop. Even the H@ Home system which is far larger has some images fail to load every now and then.

 

[Jumballi]

@Moodyz Tunnel bear, a candian company, was aquired by mcafee, an American company owned by Intel.
Though I think the reason LTT dropped them was because they never responded to linus’ calls over that conundrum.

 

[Plykiya]

@katelyngadd The node itself could be functioning improperly which means they would also fail to redirect to our own servers. Until we confirm the entire network as stable, things like this are possible

 

[katelyngadd]

@Plykiya I understand if this isn't possible, but would it be possible to redirect to the mangadex servers when the user clicks the error popup to retry, since the decision to retry is happening on the client? At least then if the node is broken that can be compensated for when browsing

 

[CatWEax]

Since read errors from md @ h nodes are to be expected, the reader should just try again from another node if the first one fails, showing the user an error message only when the second one fails as well.
Since there’s a major rewrite planned, maybe that can be put on the feature wishlist.

 

[Draggador]

The current version is pretty good but it's still nice to know that MangaDex keeps evolving.

 

[beritbunny]

Okay, I hate being a huge d*ck about the site's situation/usability-- though I made an exception and was rude/cranky about it "last time" (some weeks ago, I think). in a pinned update post's comments section...

1. Yesterday, (or was it day before?) I read this post, and many comments on it, gained familiarity, and then was beyond pleased to see performance in line with that described in post.

2. Today, ALREADY, site is near unusable again!!! Struggling to load chapters as new as 3 days old!!!

3. Guys...how can we get this to stop? Been reading for a long time, and Just Want This To Work For Me. I understand that this is spoiled and unreasonable on some level...

Can we do something like a paid Priority Queue or something??? 90% of what I want is "old chapters"...

P.S. I regret that I am currently unable to participate and help with the P2P measures being rolled on right now; am on a very busy, zealously-guarded-by-computer-scientists home network who are also WFH due to Covid right now.

 

[obitum]

Many canadian ISP are watching p2p uploading unfortunally.

 

[Princethedankest]

RIP affiliate

 

[RonBWL]

@beritbunny Unfortunately there's no way to prioritize donors because that'd be a paywall and MD would rather not having to go through all the headaches that comes with it. The only solution is to have enough fund to expand servers capacity, which is unlikely to happen.

 

[beritbunny]

@RonBWL Thanks for taking the time to reply. I understand that there are probably many undesirable issues with a having paywall section or other functionality on MD--ideological, technical, etc--but while MD is absolutely my favorites of all the sites I've used for reading manga online in the over 15 Years I've been doing so, they also have over the last several months to 1 year the absolute worst performance at times; for various reasons and sadly for weeks or months on end.

Perhaps MD serves a wider range of users worldwide? Unsure all the causes. Just saying that MD was an excellent free thing, and I want/need it to resume that level of fine service to the extent that I would participate in a steady pay for steady access/service. (And I am running out of road on my willingness to say "It can't be helped " and check back later.)

I understand if people want to say, "yeah, if you don't like it, there's the door!", but I say, TL;DR give me what I want (only and exactly) and let me pay you.

Let others who are more price sensitive or currently full of equanimity bob around in this great social soup of an experiment; they can ride the rough edge of host, tech, and traffic issues; for my part I am coming up on my 100th day of quarantine in a home including a member on Disabilty for mood disorder(s)/"Catastropic Mental Illness", among other standard issues like furloughs and I NEED this. It is "my thing" I could never store or even buy enough paper manga, though I have a fair bit. I just hope the Site guys realize people like me are out here, and consider us should this p2p fail to be the cure they are searching for.

 

[carbryvietia]

@beritbunny We had some network issues we were working through yesterday. Short term there may be some issues, but long term (a week?) you should be seeing acceptable performance.

 

[nickandnacks]

MangaDex community is more hardworking than any other community that I cant say cuz I'll get crucified if I do.

 

[kendjin]

Could a DigitalOcean droplet be used for the MangaDex@Home?

 

[Ryzou]

@kendjin

Yep. Any machine with decent speed can join md@\h

 

[AthK]

Did they still not exceed this limit https://support.google.com/docs/thread/14971209?hl=en ??